


Sea Deep, Til Doomsday Morning

by evil_whimsey



Category: xxxHoLic
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-12
Updated: 2010-12-12
Packaged: 2017-10-13 15:53:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_whimsey/pseuds/evil_whimsey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Holic Rou.  Things aren't easy for Doumeki, after Watanuki takes over the shop.  Title quoted from A.E. Housman, "A Shropshire Lad".</p>
<p>Update:  Now available as a podfic.  12MB download on Dropbox:  <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/6bkze6370pnzz5u/Holic_SeaDeepMP3.mp3">Sea Deep Podfic</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sea Deep, Til Doomsday Morning

For the first year of his incarceration in the shop, Watanuki is drunk. More or less constantly. In hindsight, Doumeki is not altogether surprised and if he's honest with himself, can't swear he would have done any different. At the time it's all happening though, when Doumeki is still going through the motions of high school, cramming for entrance exams like pretty much everyone else he knows, scooting that pile of university brochures from one side of his desk to the other, struggling to convince himself it matters, that in a universe where a boy can disappear overnight from the normal world and most everyone's memories, to stay locked in a house very few people can see and never age a day forthwith; that fate could choose this one innocent person who never harmed a soul and barely had the chance to experience the world, and yank their entire life and future prospects from underneath them....

Oh fuck it.

Suffice it to say, for that first year Doumeki is a long way from happy. He's bitter and burnt out on life and beyond confused, and he's buried up to _here_ with schoolwork and study sessions, and all the ways he has to shore up the wreckage of himself every time he talks to Kunogi and accidentally meets her eyes, every time he has to carry a message from Kohane, every time he catches himself standing at the temple gate with broom in hand and realizes no one is coming, or strings his grandfather's bow for a few hours' practice.

So Watanuki drinking his way steadily through Yuuko's varied and seemingly limitless stash of alcohol is not so big a deal, in the greater scheme of things. It seems to go along with all the rest, as far as he's concerned; par for the course, if the course is a cruel, fucked-up life sentence in a house that like, four people in the world can even see (he refuses to count the non-human members of Watanuki's acquaintance; it's not that he blames them precisely, he's just not convinced they have the vaguest clue what humans--especially broken grieving humans--need in order to get along in life). Doumeki wanders in every few days to drop off some takeout or packaged ramen, and make sure Watanuki hasn't drunkenly tripped and cracked his skull open in the bath, or set the chaise on fire with that pipe which is never far from his hand these days, or slipped on a patch of ice and taken a header off the engawa.

Usually at the most inconvenient possible times--in the middle of exam reviews; the dark wee hours of the night; stuck on the train to Shinjuku-- Doumeki will be struck by some new and creative way Watanuki could've done himself in, and then he gets no peace until he goes and checks, sees for himself that Watanuki is still physically intact. For the sake of his peace of mind, he has learned to not look too far beyond that.

Depending on his own condition, he may stay and try to clean up a bit, wrangle Watanuki from the floor, or out in the yard, or the porch, to somewhere more suitable for lying passed out drunk. He always keeps his attention strictly on the chores at hand: the bottles rolling underfoot, the sink stacked with dishes, the empty silken husks of kimono, the strewn remnants of a Go game which apparently exploded. He tidies up the worst of the tripping hazards, and listens to comments from Mokona, Maru and Moro, and only once does he make the mistake of searching Watanuki's expression for news. That turns out to be the night he makes it halfway home, before putting his fist through the window of a random parked car.

Later on, following ice packs, painkillers, and some judiciously applied bandages, he sits and stares at his university application. After an hour of failing to set it on fire with his brain, he signs it, seals the envelope and walks out to drop it in the mail.

 

The weather warms, the days lengthen, the trees are frothed with pink and white and then green. Doumeki's desk and bed are constantly awash in thicker textbooks and papers, he haunts the halls and pathways of a new campus, scribbles notes during orientation, meets people and forgets their names and faces moments later. Time is a river and he is drifting, but eventually he is less angry than he was.

And then one day, he's hungry. Not in the sense that he missed lunch, which he hadn't, more in the sense that he hadn't taken nourishment in decades. He boards the train near campus with this gnawing in his gut, a keening emptiness restless under his ribs; a stirring that he hadn't felt in so long, he'd thought surely it was gone for good. It draws him into a grocery, down the aisles, gathering parsley, radish, miso paste, mirin, tofu, cabbage, pork, bean sprouts, sesame seeds, ginger root. It's like someone's reading a cookbook in his head, page by page, and the next thing he knows he's tipping his carry basket out into a rolling cart with one bockety wheel, knees quivering and a light sweat broken out in the small of his back.

He doesn't know how he makes it to the shop, just that he's staggering when he kicks off his shoes in the genkan, stumbling toward the kitchen, very nearly collapsing to his knees when he discovers Watanuki hunched over the counter on his elbows, one shaky hand lifting a teacup to his mouth at the moment Doumeki enters.

For the first time in a long time, their gazes meet and hold instead of skittering off to the side. Just the two of them, silent and staring, while the windows gleam with sun and somewhere behind him the fridge softly rumbles. Doumeki knows better than to look this closely, to observe Watanuki straight on with both eyes, but he can't help it, he's _starving_ and barely hanging on here, realizing entirely too late that he's not at all prepared for this.

Watanuki looks exactly as bad as should be expected (though maybe not quite as bad as Doumeki has imagined, at half three in the morning). Cheekbones white and sharp and bloodshot eyes ringed about by ashy shadows. He presses his lips to a thin pale line, and the hand with the teacup descends, trembling, and Doumeki remembers that night when a jagged piece of window glass tore a furrow down the side of his fist.

It felt like this. It felt just like this.

But then Watanuki's eyes drop to the bags slipping by increments from Doumeki's arms, and Doumeki's eyes drop to the cookbook splayed open between Watanuki's elbows. They both sigh, but only Watanuki's is audible.

"Please," he states, in a voice gravelly from smoke and whisky and too many long nights lost between the cracks of what's real. "Tell me that's not all packaged ramen."

Doumeki's own voice feels like a throatful of chalk dust, and he has to swallow and try again.  
"None of it. It's....I don't."

Clearly, seeing Watanuki lucid and upright for a change is too much for him to handle. He can't even line words up in order, so he gives up and shuffles to the opposite counter, releasing his double-armload of groceries before he drops the lot.

The counters, he realizes, are spotless. As is the sink, and the range. Slowly he straightens and turns to see Watanuki still propped against the opposite counter, hair limp and tangled over his brow, creased white samue sagging at loose angles from his frame, but there is something in his eyes which definitely wasn't there the last time Doumeki had been foolhardy enough to study him. It's one glowing ember in a pile of ash, a pale green stalk in a frost-burnt field, and the instant he spots it Doumeki is seized with a mad urge to cup his hands around it, shelter it, lean in close and breathe his own life into it.

But he doesn't know. He's never known what to do for Watanuki in circumstances outside of obvious mortal peril (major blood loss, dangling off a school roof, blacked-out drunk in the grass during a thunderstorm, and that infuriatingly stupid thing with the eye-swapping). Pissing him off used to help, he used to know just how to stoke Watanuki up and get him blazing through the world again. But that was before Watanuki seeped through Doumeki's grasp and some errant hole in the fabric of reality, and everything came unraveled, and Doumeki's already spent a year simmering with rage and shame that he could somehow graduate their prestigious little private high school with top honors and yet still hadn't the faintest inkling of how to help this one person, take away even the smallest measure of their pain. Just for a short while.

He thinks about apologizing for everything (because for all Watanuki's been through, _someone_ should fucking well apologize); for being unprepared and frail and mortal and just as useless as Watanuki always accused him of being, and most of all for being able to stroll in and out of that front door whenever he chooses, being able to go back to his own life when Watanuki most likely never will again.

But instead, because Watanuki is still looking at him, one eyebrow steadily rising, while somewhere behind his weary despair, and whatever he's been living with since all his capacity for anger boiled itself dry, there is a faint tickling of hope that he is suddenly absolutely terrified of, Doumeki says, "I couldn't find squash."

Watanuki's other brow goes up, and Doumeki finds himself elaborating. Awkwardly. "I thought, squash, with that....soup stock? And. Something with beef. But there wasn't any squash."

Watanuki peers at the air between them, studying it for a code he can decipher, possibly. "Where did you go."

Honestly, Doumeki has no idea. "Supermarket. By the station." He shrugs.

There is a longish pause, while they both wait for something more; Watanuki waits for specifics, and Doumeki for some kind of sign or epiphany, or maybe just something meaningful he can say, that won't sound like complete gibberish. Though by now he should really know better.

"Bring a chair in here," Watanuki finally tells him, in a tone more like acquiescence than demand, and Doumeki blinks, he's not sure what to do with this.

"I'm going to sit." Now there's a clipped edge to his words, a distant echo of something Doumeki used to know, feeding that stupid dangerous hopeful spark he's trying very hard to ignore. "And you are going to..." Watanuki's gaze drifts to a sharp shiny knife sitting out on the countertop, and hardens. "Chop vegetables."

Doumeki glances at the knife, pictures Watanuki's thin white fingers around his quivering teacup, and nods emphatically. "Yeah, okay." He can do that, and he can also pretend that Watanuki's stony expression means he isn't expecting much from Doumeki's chopping skills, and not that Watanuki is liable to take his own hand off with that knife, the state he's in.

 

They get through it somehow, that first night with Watanuki actually sober enough to address him. The hotpot turns out bland and the carrots are chunky, and the black tea Watanuki shares is almost strong enough to stand a spoon in.

But they get through it. Doumeki will not ask what brought this change, nor will he speculate whether it's likely to persist. It's enough that he won't feel the need to break any windows tonight, that he won't be snapped awake at some ungodly hour by visions of blood or smoldering upholstery or black hair sinking below the waterline in the bath.

For the first time in a year, Doumeki feels it's safe to straighten up, look around him and breathe.

And that's enough. That's all he needs.

 

*end*

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [This Shaking Keeps Me Steady](https://archiveofourown.org/works/617973) by [ophelietta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophelietta/pseuds/ophelietta)




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